How turning Highland blackcurrants into jam can make for a sticky situation

EVERY week, Flic Everett will be detailing her hilarious transition of leaving the bustling city life of Manchester for a Highland fling in the north of Scotland.

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Flic's jam

ALTHOUGH we live in what is technically the middle of nowhere – our postcode is listed on the electoral register under “where?” and couriers with parcels tend to lie down in a field and let the weather take them and the crows pick their bones before they find us - we do have neighbours.

They are my boyfriend’s dad and step mum, who live just across the way, in a very beautiful farmhouse with a garden where Andy’s Dad grows bushels of fruit and vegetables. Not being a gardener myself - I only have to look at a potted herb from the Co–op for it to shrug and wilt helplessly - I can’t say I’ve offered to help him till his bean-rows and hoe his onions. But whenever he’s willing to offload any of his bonanza harvest festival onto us, I’m more than happy. It tastes great, and it means I don’t have to fork out for limp veg in plastic trays that I then shove to the back of the fridge and forget about.

Flic picked the blackcurrants from her garden

Last week, it turned out the blackcurrants were ready, and that there were far too many for the gardeners to eat themselves. “They’ve already got a freezer stuffed full of them from last year,” said Andy. I had a brief fantasy about making blackcurrant wine, but as I have none of the necessary equipment, and zero idea of how to go about wine-making - plus, to be frank, I like a nice New Zealand Sauvignon more than some sticky, amateurish moonshine brewed in a shed - I let that go.

What I can make, though, is jam, and I thought how delightful it would be to have a shelf full of little jars, glowing like amethysts through the Winter, and saving us a fortune on pricy Bonne Maman. Having said that, we probably eat less than one pot of jam a year, but I grew up watching The Waltons, and pickling and preserving always sounds excitingly nostalgic.

We headed out in a deluge of rain to the large fruit cage behind the farmhouse, where blackcurrants were running rampant. It was hard to see anything through the stair-rods, and my waterproof jacket was leaking, while water dripped into my eyes from my hat brim. It wasn’t quite the bucolic vision I’d hoped for, but after half an hour in an upright swimming pool, trying to locate the berries, we had a vast bowl full. Back at the house, it took another hour to pick all the bits of twig and leaf out, and then I read the recipe, in my fail-safe Ballymaloe Cookbook.

Flic made more jam than she had anticipated...

“Fruit picked when wet has a tendency to go mouldy in jam” advises its author, cooking guru, Darina Allen. “Make sure you pick it when dry.” Bit late for that. I didn’t have enough sugar, and after an hour of desperate stirring ( “This stage should take twenty minutes”) it was still looking like a thin black soup, so I chucked in half a bottle of pectin to help it set. (Darina: “Blackcurrants don’t require pectin.”) Finally, I had a roiling purple mass that wrinkled up when dropped on a saucer. So all I then had to do was pot my jam- except it turned out I’d made a ton more than I’d anticipated and was six pots short. It took another half hour to find jars, tip the olives out, sterilise them and dry them in the oven. Then I got jam everywhere trying to ladle it in.

Other than that, it was a very successful episode. We now have seven pots of jam, which by my calculations should last us till some time in 2023. Now my only problem is what to do with next week’s runner beans.